Jakarta EE Community Update November 2019

Now that Jakarta EE 8 has been available for a couple of months, I want to share news about some of the great committee work that’s been happening. I also want to tell you about our latest Jakarta EE-compatible product, and make sure you have links to the recordings of our Jakarta EE community calls and presentations.

Due to the timing of this update, I’ve included news about activities in the first half of November as well as October.

The Payara team told us they found the compatibility process smooth and easy. To learn more about the benefits of being certified as a Jakarta EE-compatible product and the process to get listed, click here.

Jakarta EE 8 Feedback Will Drive Improvements

The Jakarta EE Steering Committee started a community retrospective on the Jakarta EE 8 release, sharing this document to drive the process.

You’ll also see retrospectives from each of the other Jakarta EE Working Group committees as they look to gather community input on improvements for the next release. Once all of the input is collected, we’ll summarize and publish the findings.

Jakarta EE 9 Delivery Plan to Be Ready December 9

Jakarta EE 9 planning is underway, and the Steering Committee has published a resolution requesting Jakarta EE Platform Project leaders to deliver a Jakarta EE 9 Delivery Plan, including a release date, to the Steering Committee no later than December 9, 2019.

According to the resolution, the Jakarta EE 9 Delivery Plan should:

Implement the “big bang”

Include an explicit means to identify and enable specifications that are unnecessary or unwanted to be deprecated or removed

Move all remaining specification APIs to the Jakarta namespace

Add no new specifications, apart from those pruned from Java SE 8 where appropriate, unless those specifications will not impact the target delivery date

The resolution is now with the Jakarta EE Platform Project team, which is actively looking into the Steering Committee requests. The Platform Project team will put a higher priority on meeting the Steering Committee resolution requests as soon as possible rather than adding more functionality to the release.

You can read the minutes of the Jakarta EE Platform Project team meetings here.

New Chair for the Jakarta EE Specification Committee

We welcome Paul Buck as the non-voting Chair of the Jakarta EE Specification Committee. Paul is Vice President of Community Development at the Eclipse Foundation, and was unanimously elected to his new role.

Jakarta EE 8 Restructuring Continues

In the push to complete Jakarta EE 8, a number of planned improvements were deferred. Here’s a brief summary of the improvements the Jakarta EE Specification Committee is currently discussing:

Whether top-level projects should be changed to include both specifications and compatible implementations as subpages

How to address the decision to rename TCK files from “eclipse-” to “jakarta-”

Time to Jakartify More Specifications

When Jakarta EE 8 was released, we provided specifications for the Jakarta EE Full Profile and Jakarta EE Web Profile. Now that we’ve acquired the copyright for additional specifications, it’s time for the community to Jakartify them so they can be contributed to Jakarta EE.

Ivar Grimstand provided a demo during the monthly community call on October 16. You can view it here.

And, here’s the list of specifications that are ready for the community to "Jakartify":

• Jakarta Annotations

• Jakarta Enterprise Beans

• Jakarta Expression Language

• Jakarta Security

• Jakarta Server Faces

• Jakarta Interceptors

• Jakarta Authorization

• Jakarta Activation

• Jakarta Managed Beans

• Jakarta Deployment

• Jakarta XML RPC

• Jakarta Authentication

• Jakarta Mail

• Jakarta XML Binding

• Jakarta RESTful Web Services

• Jakarta Web Services Metadata

• Jakarta XML Web Services

• Jakarta Connectors

• Jakarta Persistence

• Jakarta JSON Binding

• Jakarta JSON Processing

• Jakarta Debugging Support for Other Languages

• Jakarta Server Pages

• Jakarta Transactions

• Jakarta WebSocket

On a related note, the Specification Committee is also working to further define compatibility testing requirements for the full platform and web profile specifications for subsequent releases of Jakarta EE-compatible products.

Jakarta EE Marketing Plan Nearly Finalized

We expect the Jakarta EE 2020 marketing plan and budget to be approved by the end of November.

The Marketing Committee is also looking to choose a Committee Chair very soon. In the meantime, the Eclipse Foundation will be actively participating in KubeCon, NA. If you’re there, be sure to drop by booth S5 to talk to our technical experts and check out the demos on the cloud native Java projects.

Join Community Update Calls

Every month, the Jakarta EE community holds a Community Call for everyone in the Jakarta EE community. For upcoming dates and connection details, see the Jakarta EE Community Calendar.

We know it’s not always possible to join calls in real time, so here are links to the recordings and presentations:

In addition to many reports and blogs you may find on the participation, I would like to point out the ECE 2019 Community Day collaboration between IoT and Cloud Native Java teams. Even though it was just a starting point attempt to work on the solution by both teams, it was great seeing two Eclipse Foundation communities working together! I am looking for more of these collaborations in the future. Please look for blog from Jens Reimann (@ctron) from Red Hat on this.

Stay Connected With the Jakarta EE Community

The Jakarta EE community is very active and there are a number of channels to help you stay up to date with all of the latest and greatest news and information. Tanja Obradovic’s blog summarizes the community engagement plan, which includes: